wikiHow:Hybrid Organization

wikiHow is a hybrid organization: a for-profit company focused on creating a global public good in accordance with our mission. In short, wikiHow is run by its founder Jack Herrick as a business that focuses on accomplishing a social mission.

What is a Hybrid Organization?

wikiHow is focused on achieving our educational mission of enabling everyone on the planet to learn how to do anything. While we are organized as a for-profit company, we don’t consider ourselves a typical business. We’re a hybrid organization, which uses the power of for-profit business to accomplish a charitable mission.

To us, a hybrid organization combines the best elements of traditional businesses with nonprofits:

Like a nonprofit, wikiHow focuses on fulfilling its mission to help educate people for free.

Like a business, it uses profits to finance its operations, innovate, expand, and assure stability for the project.

If wikiHow succeeds at creating a significantly-sized, profitable hybrid organization, we hope we can serve as a role model for other entrepreneurs and businesses to follow. The world would be a better place if more organizations succeeded at creating thriving public goods instead of focusing only on profit.

Most businesses turn to the dark side — why won’t wikiHow?

We’ve given our community the right to "fork" wikiHow and restart the project elsewhere if they should ever decide the company is no longer the best steward of wikiHow’s mission. The text content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons, and the software is licensed under the GNU General Public License and available for free download. A fork would create a nonprofit organization, move the content and software to another domain, and continue building wikiHow without the staff and company that currently run the site. This “right to fork” guarantees that wikiHow will always be run as a business that focuses on achieving its mission.

How does wikiHow make money?

wikiHow shows advertising that users can opt out of seeing. In fact, wikiHow is one of the few "advertising-optional" websites on the Internet. If you do not wish to see advertising here, simply register an account and login.

What does wikiHow do with the money it makes?

Our top priority is to maintain and continuously improve our site for the benefit of wikiHow readers and editors. A healthy financial situation allows us to pay our staff well, which increases the odds that we can continue attracting the very best people to work at wikiHow. In times when wikiHow is profitable, we return money to founder Jack Herrick and his friend Josh Hannah, who fund wikiHow when it’s unprofitable. We also like to give money to charities (we’ve given $163,500 to date.) When wikiHow is unprofitable, Jack will personally fund the site and take actions to make sure the site and mission are preserved through temporary financial troubles. wikiHow is constructed to survive financially through the multi-decade time frame that will be necessary to advance our mission. If you want to learn more about wikiHow and money, read this detailed forum post.

Does wikiHow accept financial donations?

No; wikiHow has never accepted donations. While many people have asked to donate over the years, accepting donations just doesn’t seem right to us. If you want to support the work we do financially, we’d encourage you to donate to nonprofits that share similar goals, such as the Wikimedia Foundation and Creative Commons. We donate to them!

Is wikiHow venture-capital financed?

No. wikiHow has been entirely financed by its founder Jack Herrick, and to a lesser extent his friend Josh Hannah. We have not met any external investors who match our desire to put our mission ahead of short-term profit. While it’s always possible this might change, and we recognize that having access to more capital would help us accelerate our mission, we currently think our self-financed structure is best aligned with our long-term goals.

You don’t want more money? Are you crazy California hippies?

Hmm, while we do live in California and some of us do like music from the 1960s, we don’t consider ourselves crazy. :) In addition, we would always like more money, and as a business we are trying to earn more. We aren’t monks — we think we are savvy entrepreneurs. We just believe that being a “hybrid organization” structure is the best way to build a business that simultaneously benefits the world and shareholders. We wish more businesses would adopt this model, for greedy as well as altruistic reasons.

Who owns wikiHow?

It depends what you mean by “own”: wikiHow “the company” is owned by its founder, Jack Herrick and some smaller shareholders. When the “company” does well, Jack and the other shareholders benefit financially as the owners. On the other hand, wikiHow's content is owned by everyone since it is Creative Commons licensed, meaning that anyone can use and redistribute it for non-commercial purposes. The software that wikiHow developed is owned by the general public, since it is freely licensed under the GPL, and available to download.

In addition, anyone has the right to "fork" wikiHow and move all the content and software to new servers and domain, so in some sense Jack "owns" almost nothing. Basically, Jack is the steward of the wikiHow community and a financial beneficiary of the project’s success — as long as the community believes he is a good steward for the wikiHow mission.